Monday, October 15, 2012

BAD12, The Power of We

I was having lunch Friday at the CCCBE(The Centre for Co-operative and Community-Based Economy) at the
University of Victoria. This is a highlight of my week, giving me an
intense hour of discussion on various topics with some very smart
people. Friday, four of us ran a bit long, unable to stop talking
about not the changes that have to be made, but about how to spark
the action around the changes that have to be made to make human life
on Earth sustainable over the long term.

And its not like we weren't all active
in some way. One was working on the CRD (the Capital RegionalDistrict) sustainability plan, another was active in sustainable
development in Sooke—particularly around the former Western Forest
Product lands that have been purchased by a developer keen to turn
the place into a massive tourist development right on top of the Juan de Fuca Marine Trail (a piece of wildness dear to my heart). Mention was
made of the public hearings around the Trail development and how a
number of old hippies and draft dodgers who had gone back into the
hills around Sooke and homesteaded, had come out of the woodwork to
raise their concerns about the development. But they also talked
about how difficult it had been to farm in the area, how they had realised that they really couldn't do it alone.

When we moved back to the farm when
the kids were tykes, we had much the same feeling—we'll be a
self-sustaining unit and do it all ourselves. And thank heavens we
moved to our family farm and had help from outside ourselves. While
we knew a great deal of what we wanted to do, we really needed the
knowledge, skills,training, and access to tools that the family
provided.

Recently someone was talking to me and
said that they would like to take that some path back to
self-sufficiency, but they simply couldn't learn enough to be able to
do everything, it struck me that we always think like this: its
always about doing it alone. The cultural mythology is about the lone
homesteader against the frightening wildness of the new land. The
Canadian myth of survival (as Margret Atwood detailed) is always that
one life silhouetted against the stark backdrop of this new country.
We sing of the lone explorer searching for the way across this land,
whether through the mountains of BC, across the drought-lands of the
southern prairies, or at the top of the world searching for the
North-West Passage. And, frankly, its pretty much bullshit.

Franklin, Palliser, Fraser, these guys
weren't alone. They were part of teams. And their teams weren't lone
explorers. They were ignorant goofs who were fed into the massive
trade network that covered the Americas before European arrival by
“native guides”.

But it has been necessary to build the
myth that the Americas were empty land opened by Europeans—the
truth is, those homesteaders were walking into functioning farms,
villages, and cities emptied by European diseases. But rather than
acknowledge our genocide, we would rather believe that strong
individualists created nations out of nothing.

And even that is nonsense. Each
incremental step in settling into First Nations lands was supported
by developing infrastructure and supports. It did no good to
homestead in Alberta if you couldn't get your products to market. You
couldn't survive without manufactured goods coming from somewhere.
Where people tried to do it alone ahead of the support structures,
they quickly fell backwards through time, and looked more and more
like the first Babylonian farmers, before they developed irrigation.

Because the truth is, we none of us do
it alone. You need someone on the other end of that board, covering
for you when you get sick, buying the stuff you make. You want to go
back to the land? Start a small farm? There's not only a lot of other
people interested in the same thing, but you'll be going into a
functioning network of small businesses, suppliers, and the like who
are there to help.

We are, whether we recognise it or
not, members of communities; formal ones like trade unions, and
informal ones like community supported agriculture members. We are
social animals, not solitary ones (even if, like me, you like to be
alone on occasion), and it is our communities that are important. And
they create themselves. I'm reminded of reading Novella Carpenter's
book and how the moment she started growing food in the unused lot
next to her apartment block, a community spontaneously formed around
the garden. Or how small actions around the world seemed to explode
into the Occupy movement. Our actions can generate community, and our
communities support us in our actions.

Because you're not alone. Nor am I.
And the minute we look outside of ourselves, the instant we act, we
discover we're not alone.

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Hitch-hiked across Canada in the mid-seventies, changing, in the process, from an Albertan into a Canadian. Entered post-secondary studies at Grant McEwan College in Edmonton, moving over to the U of Alberta a year later to read English Lit. Friends invited me out for a visit to Victoria, and a week later I had a job, place to live, and was enrolled at UVic. Married two years later, we had twins (a boy, a girl, and a vasectomy), moved back to Alberta where we ran an over-educated New Agriculture farm for fourteen years. After the kids moved out, moved back to Victoria where we discovered sea kayaking. Live quietly, trying to pursue a life of voluntary simplicity, although we occasionally fail to live up to our own ideals. Still married, 28 years later, to the same person--and quite happy about it. Currently working on a book about Canadian food security issues.